27 NEWS FOCUS Al Jazeera
were established decades ago and workflows are quite solid and quite stable. It’s not easy to move them. A lot of TV channels have been forced to open a digital department and leave behind the traditional newsroom.” The migration of journalists to a new, fully digital newsroom requires the incorporation of new sets of tools and the adoption of new skill sets, including working with CMS, web publishing and social media. Piece by piece, newsrooms are adopting the advantages of cloud- based tools that were previously only the domain of a few outliers in a specialised digital department. During its research and vetting process, Al Jazeera investigated how its existing systems could be upgraded or improved using cloud-based tools. “What we realised,” says Logozar, “is that the cloud is a totally new business model. It’s a totally new technology, with totally new developers and support engineers, and totally new skills for designing and operating the workflows. And, finally, it’s a big business change – not just a technology change.”
finally get the new feature, you forgot why you needed it in the first place. We can go from a development time of half a year to half a day,” he says. Al Jazeera has been using React (a JavaScript technology for building user interfaces) to improve access to the apps its teams use on a daily basis, and is embracing the rapid pace of transformation that the cloud offers. A much faster development cycle means journalists can request features and then, in a short time, see if they work or not. It also means being able to readily publish to other digital media outlets, whether it’s the big social platforms or a new outlet or partner. Al Jazeera is now working on new ways of organising teams for greater creativity and efficiency. “In the cloud, we can start working with continuous integration and development in a DevOps environment,” says Logozar. “We can have one journalist, one operational person and one developer working on one problem. They can immediately interact, exchange ideas, iterate on ideas and then, the next day, immediately improve on the ideas.”
WHAT WE REALISED IS THAT THE CLOUD IS A TOTALLY NEW BUSINESSMODEL
One of Al Jazeera’s first steps in this overhaul was to create a cloud-based newsroom for its bureau at the UN in New York City. A NEW ENVIRONMENT Speed and flexibility are the business- transforming assets that cloud can make available, explains Logozar. “With the cloud, we can change the actual workflows on a daily basis. If you’re using a lot of those traditional newsroom applications, you can’t adapt to the fast pace of online and digital media. If you want to change them, you might have to wait months. When you
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